


Head Cases Part V: The Final Frontier

by freyburg



Series: Head Cases [5]
Category: Daleks - Fandom, Doctor Who, Star Wars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:56:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25785502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/freyburg/pseuds/freyburg
Summary: Morbius and Handles attend a scary briefing at the Rebel base on Yavin. Davros fumes but gets his moment when Darth Vader readies the Death Star for the Rebel attack.
Series: Head Cases [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/744039
Comments: 1





	Head Cases Part V: The Final Frontier

Morbius wobbled unsteadily in his fluid, his jar balanced precariously inside an X-Wing pilot's helmet. That was being generous, Morbius thought. The young man currently toting him about in his neglected headgear called himself Tanner, a name as simple and unambitious as its owner. 

And yet here Tanner sat, looking quite uncomfortable in an orange and white flight suit, listening intently as a bearded authority figure prattled on about exhaust vents and giant space stations. A mere bauble compared to Gallifreyan technology, he mused, casting his mind back to his days with Rassilon and the rest of the Timeless Children..

"That's nothing! I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home and they're not much bigger than two metres!" a hirsute young man sitting across from Morbius said. 

"Handles! What's a womp rat?" Morbius hissed at the robot head strapped to Tanner's belt. 

"Large vermin indigenous to desert planet of Tatooine," Handles said. 

What a stupid name for a planet, Morbius thought. 

A murmur travelled through the crowd and Morbius sensed a wave of doubt and fear rising in the cramped room. Whatever the bearded man had in store, he imagined he wouldn't like it.

Tanner jerked forward suddenly, throwing Morbius off balance. 

"Watch it, human!" Morbius snarled, cerebral fluid pelting his cortex.

"Sorry, I was asleep," Tanner said. 

"With your eyes open?"

"It's a talent," Tanner smirked. "But hey, wait! Did I hear him say attack? On the Death Star?"

"Assessment: correct," Handles chimed. 

“What the hell did I sign up for? Wait, I didn’t!”

“You stowed away on that miserable excuse for a freighter, young man, and I see you regret the error of your ways,” Morbius bubbled smugly. 

"Nah, it beat working on that giant dump of a space station. Wait a minute..."

Morbius waited. He'd only caught bits and pieces of the briefing, and yet he felt confident he was ahead of the ape descendant in front of him. 

"If I'm part of this mission..."

"Yes, do go on.." Morbius said. He would have smirked if he could, instead contenting himself with a bubble massage for his prefrontal cortex. 

"I can blow that craphole out of the sky!"

"Precisely!" Morbius declared. A perfect solution to the seemingly intractable problem of being joined at the hip to this indolent rapscallion. 

"I'll need help though," Tanner said, looking down pointedly at his helmet. 

A lone bubble popped in Morbius’ tank. The situation was rapidly spinning out of control, and with it his temper. 

"I absolutely refuse!" he said. 

“Don’t see how you have a choice in the matter, brainstem,” Tanner said, patting the tank condescendingly.

“This is an indignity! I was once Lord President of the..”

“give it a rest, Pruney.”

“Of all the...” Morbius stopped. This would require cunning and persuasion. If that didn’t work, more ranting.

“Tanner..” Morbius cooed as small bubbles trailing his medulla oblongata, “you’re not..keen on danger, are you?”

“Well, no, I guess not,” Tanner replied, a quizzical expression crossing his face. 

“Or work, for that matter, and who can blame you? Such a menial position on that space station, not fit for one of your obvious abilities.”

“You know, for a hideous brain, you’re making some points,” Tanner said, his face brightening.

Morbius shrugged off the insult and continued.

“Given those facts, why would you go to the effort of attacking this space station? It seems like a lot of work for, let’s face it, a noble but ultimately futile gesture that will result in the deaths of every single pilot in this room.”

“Hey, keep your voice down!” Tanner said, glancing at the sea of orange jumpsuits surrounding him.

“Analysis: correct,” Handles said.

“Thank you, Handles,” Morbius replied. 

“Emotional levels of room: rising,” the silver head added.

“No need to state the obvious,” Morbius retorted. 

“Analysis: correct,” Handles said.

“Listen, my boy,” a touch obvious, but he doubted the human would notice,” if you’d paid the slightest bit of attention to this very briefing..”

“Ha! Fat chance.”

Morbius ignored the interruption and continued. “You would have heard the chances of success for this mission are stupendously low. I’ve only known you a short while, but you don’t strike me as much of a gambler. Indeed, your previous performance at sabacc left much to be desired.”

“I never got a chance to play!”

“Yes, and honestly I think that’s your best option here as well. Make a show of it, lend some moral support, and then make yourself scarce and more importantly, safe,” Morbius said. 

“Like you care. I’m just a pack mule to you. At least this weird droid is kinda fun,” Tanner said as he poked idly at Handles’ voicebox unit.

“Request: cease action,” Handles said.

“Uh, sure buddy, whatever,” Tanner said and turned to Morbius. “Alright, Brain. You got me. For a second there shooting at my former employer sounded like fun, but I don’t want to get killed. Let’s get out of here.” 

Tanner stood up, collecting his helmet as he awkwardly stretched across the seated pilots. 

“Then man your ships..and may the Force be with you” rang out from the man at the front of the room.

“Cool cool, yeah, the Force. Sounds good! Gotta go..” Tanner muttered as he weaved through the crowd.

This was more like it, Morbius thought. Now to convince Tanner to steal a ship and leave this doomed planet. 

“Just a minute, lad!” A Calamarian clamped a long-fingered hand on Tanner’s shoulder. 

“Yeah? This isn’t about that dumb card game, is it?”

“It most certainly is! The way I see it, you were relieved this attack interrupted our sabacc session, and now I see you beating a hasty retreat just as we’re about to go into the fight of our lives!”

Tanner blinked. So far the fish man was telling the truth. 

“Why, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you were a coward!” The Mon Calamari said, pointing a pungent appendage at Tanner’s face.

Tanner raised his own arm in protest, then lowered it. The fish had a point.

“You got me! Coward all the way.”

“Well not this time, youngling. You and your..whatever that is are coming with me.”

A long fishy hand gripped Morbius’s jar while the other reached behind Tanner and hoisted him by his belt. 

“Whoa, hey!” He exclaimed as the surprisingly strong fishman lifted him. Tanner kicked and struggled but the Calamari’s iron grip would not yield. 

“Where are you taking me?” Tanner said, panic rising in his voice. 

“Yes, where are you taking us?!” Morbius added, bubbling with rage. 

“Just you wait,” the Calamari said. “And tell your disgusting droid to be quiet!”

Morbius fumed. He was NOT a droid.

—

Davros fidgeted in the back of Darth Vader’s TIE fighter. He’d managed to tie himself into the Imperial communications network via the ship’s computer, but weapon systems were another matter. Not that it would be practical to let loose with a barrage of laser fire in the bay of a space station, but it would have slaked his burning need for destruction. 

Ah well, he thought, back to the banalities of administrative chatter between armored functionaries. 

The eye in his forehead tingled. That either meant faulty wiring (once again), or impending danger. He assumed the latter given the gleaming newness of the station but the amount of abuse he’d endured over the past 24 hours could have jangled his head circuitry.

A loud buzzing sound interrupted his speculation and the monotone bleatings of Stormtroopers echoed through the TIE’s cockpit. 

"T-16? That's kid's stuff."

"I dunno, the latest model is something to see, they say.."

Davros winced and concentrated on modifying the signal. His Daleks had a singular vision and lacked conversational acumen, but unlike these cloned failures they at least concentrated on important topics like conquest, hatred and ultimate victory. 

Just a little further down the spectrum, he mused, and he could patch into internal monitoring systems. 

A familiar voice echoed through the cockpit.

“This had better work, Vader.”

The Doctor! But not the Doctor, or rather, not a Doctor in the usual sense. Davros had only scanned the being called Tarkin briefly during their brief encounter in the holding bay, and though his bio readings indicated a human being (a chameleon arch made that an easy trick) and his appearance was that of a high ranking Imperial functionary, he was convinced it was his greatest nemesis.

But why here, and now? And why the disguise? Shouldn’t the Doctor be wearing something flamboyant and showing off?  
It had to be an elaborate plot to destroy him, he concluded. Why else would he be here? He was after all the Doctor’s greatest nemesis. Jackdaw meanderings aside, the errant Time Lord had dogged his plans for millennia and harassment in a nightmarish parallel universe was merely his latest flourish in their endless struggle across time and space.

Davros cast his mind back to their previous meeting. The Doctor was up to something, that much was clear, but impersonating an Imperial officer didn’t fit his usual behaviour. Nor did his earlier bonhomie in the Death Star hangar. 

It didn’t make sense...except! Yes, that was it! A paradox. Davros bubbled angrily to himself. How could he, the creator of the Daleks and the greatest scientist in Skaro’s history have missed such an obvious conclusion?

It was Morbius’s fault, he decided. The former Time Lord’s constant complaining and preening had caused him to lose focus. The overpowering malevolence of Darth Vader hadn’t helped either. 

Vader, Davros mused. While Morbius and the irritatingly helpful Cyberman had gone off to who knows where, the armoured wizard remained a threat to him, particularly while he sat in the Dark Lord’s personal fighter. 

But now at least he had something to focus on. Vader was terrifying but remarkably linear in his thinking. He was clearly in thrall to the Emperor and followed orders like any other functionary. When the time came, Vader would do the Emperor’s bidding. It remained up to Davros to take advantage of that fact and the knowledge only he possessed about the other incongruity skulking around the station playing soldiers.

Clearly the Doctor was stranded. Nobody, not even an eccentric like the Gallifreyan would go to such elaborate lengths to disguise themselves, and he had a history of misplacing both his person and his time vessel.

The TARDIS! If he could only locate the absurd blue box, he might be able to harness its power and leave this universe for good. But if the Doctor hadn’t done so already, perhaps it was lost, destroyed or otherwise inaccessible.

The only way to find out was to look. Davros refocused his eye on the communications panel, willing it to search lower frequencies than it was strictly capable of, but then he was a scientific genius. 

His middle eye thrummed with effort as he concentrated on projecting his thoughts into the remarkably primitive Imperial computers. He had to break the system’s encryption manually, using only his powerful brain to solve math problems as they were flung at him by the station’s many memory banks. Davros momentarily scoffed at the laughable graphics capabilities of the display subsystems before remembering his own universe had no claim of superiority in such matters, at least not until recently.

Back to the task at hand. A final barrage of sums pounded his cerebellum and he dodged the equations with aplomb before...there. The control deck for a most fearsome weapon, a behemoth capable of obliterating whole systems. A wave of bloodlust overtook Davros and he reeled backward in his fluid. So this was the Empire’s big secret. But not for long, he surmised, as his eye detected Vader’s presence in the chamber. 

Davros shuddered, both at the sheer power of the Death Star and out of fear of the Dark Lord brooding within it. 

“This had better work, Vader,” he heard the Doctor say. Plans within plans! What elaborate feint did the Time Lord have in store for this place?

“This will be a day long remembered. It has seen the end of Kenobi, it will soon see the end of the Rebellion,” the masked monster intoned. 

Kenobi? The Rebellion? More mysteries to puzzle through later, he thought. The priority was to get off the station and back to his universe. The Doctor was up to something, that much was clear, and so deeply invested in his disguise not even the mystical powers at Vader’s command could detect a discrepancy. Davros grimaced as he acknowledged to himself the the extent of the Doctor’s guile. 

But how to use it to his advantage? It was all very well to penetrate computer systems and eavesdrop, but he was immobile in Vader’s vehicle, hidden away in a side compartment by the Doctor...that was it! The Doctor must have placed him here for a reason. He winced at the feeling of being a mere cog in the Time Lord’s schemes rather than a counterpoint to them. 

In fact his entire existence had led to this. Despite creating the most fearsome warrior race in the universe (well, a universe at any rate) he had tumbled from failure to failure, until now here he was, a head in a closet moving radio waves to stave off insanity. There would be no escape from here. Either he would expire of neglect in this dingy fighter or go out in a blaze of someone else’s glory as Vader battled this so-called Rebellion in some futile contretemps. 

There was nothing for it, he thought. Time to finally give up and embrace the great dark. He only hoped his children would continue spreading dread and malice across his own universe after he was gone. 

A klaxon broke through his melancholic musings. It clattered through the Tie Fighter’s innards, echoing back and forth across its matte metal interior and nearly deafening him in the process.

“Rebel fighters approaching the Death Star. Rebel fighters approaching the Death Star.”

Yes, Davros thought. Yes! Of course the Time Lord would know this attack was on the way, just has he undoubtedly knew how it would turn out. The Doctor was using the conflict between these two factions to his own ends! Somehow, when this battle was over, the Gallifreyan would be at an advantage. Like always, he would snatch victory from almost certain doom, presumably all while making irreverent remarks and waggling his eyebrows or some other such theatrical nonsense. 

But this time, Davros thought, he would no longer be a pawn. He may be a head in a jar in a ship in a station in a universe all alone, but soon the Dark Lord of the Sith (whatever that was) would rush down to his ship and do battle with his foes. And when that happened, Skaro’s last pure survivor would use him to take down the Empire, the Rebellion, and most importantly of all, the Doctor. 

OMG TO BE CONTINUED PEW PEW PEW!


End file.
